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Usenet Co-founder Jim Ellis Dies 170

Posted by CmdrTaco from the people-who-changed-the-world dept.
complex writes "Jim Ellis, one of the cofounders of Usenet, has passed away. Usenet is considered the first large information sharing service, predating the WWW by years." He was 45 years old, and died after battling non-Hodgkins lymphoma for 2 years. Usenet of course began in 1979, and is the 2nd of the 3 most important applications on the net (the first being email, and the third being the web). Truly a man who changed the world.
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Usenet Co-founder Jim Ellis Dies More

Usenet Co-founder Jim Ellis Dies

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  • Thanks a lot. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I never knew you, but thanks anyway, dude.

    If Usenet is one of the first really democratic institutions, shouldn't we all recognize this as significant as when one of the country's Founding Fathers died? Just an idea...

  • Rest in peace (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Out of respect, can we shutdown usenet for a while?? Just long enough for the spammers to find something better to do? Please?

  • HTML+Usenet=NO! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    No, please. If you cannot say what you want to say with simple ASCII text, then no amount of fancy fonts, bandwidth-wasteful graphics, or flashing colors are going to help you.

    Usenet's beauty is that it can be read from, and posted to, on ANYthing from a dumb ASCII terminal to a Cray supercomputer cluster. Let's keep it that way.

  • Re:Usenet was NOT the Internet (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29, 2001 @11:42AM (#119761)
    Thank's for the first damn intelligent post on the sad passing of this man. I was scrolling and about to leave this in disgust. Yes I remember the Net when it was just BBS and Usenet. Had Jim never made this possible who knows where it would have gone? Maybe the corporate whores we have today...maybe not. Anyway...thank you. Thank you for an intelligent post and a bit of history for these kiddies. You little shits need to brush up on where you came from and who made it possible. You little piss-ants disgust me.
  • Nice. Is this available for download somewhere?

  • Re:in related news... (Score:3)

    by Have Blue ( 616 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @09:06AM (#119763) Homepage
    A whole lot of dead spammers! COOL!

  • Re:RIP (Score:1)

    by CaseyB ( 1105 )
    alt.internet.pioneer.die.die.die
  • Give people usenet, they will kill it. And there's no way back. "Imminent death of Usenet predicted. Film at 11."

  • Re:Why I no longer use Usenet (Score:3)

    by CaseyB ( 1105 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @12:11PM (#119766)
    "I remember when Usenet was populated mostly with intelligent academics and techies, and we had thoughtful discussions, and there was no spam, and no flamewars."

    -- Everyone that has ever used Usenet for more than a year, regardless of what year they started.

  • We get Microsoft and a bazillion spammers, and God gets Jim Ellis. That's not fair! What kind of rip-off does He think He can pull on us? I want to check that deck, before the next deal.
  • The best thing about the Usenet, as opposed to the web, was that the Usenet had some structure and some sense of "governance." You couldn't (at least in the main trees) just start a group. You had to get some people to agree with you that it was a good idea. Thus, you avoided for a long time the "mySillyWebIdea.com" effect, where the signal was drowned in all the noise.

    The spam is indeed unfortunate... I wonder if you could setup an extension of NNTP with authentication to prevent groups being killed in spam and restore the "ad-hocracy"?

    --

  • The nasty thing IMHO is all the email collecting bots that wander trough ALL groups pr0n or no pr0n. A newbie has no chance to know about this and fake an email or SPAM-prove it. Many an email accounts are rendered useless by this.

    Personally, I've been using Usenet since 1996 (mostly sfnet.* groups, some alt.*, comp.* and rec.* groups...) and I have never used a spam-blocked E-mail address. I get a surprisingly low volume of E-mail spam.

    Apparently it pays to report the spam to the originating ISPs. =)

    Spam-blocked E-mail addresses, in Usenet and web, are more of an inconvinience for the users than to spammers...

  • > ..not everyone can claim to have created a true community single-handedly.

    And actually, neither can Jim Ellis. Steve Bellovin, Tom Truscott, and Steve Daniel helped.
  • If you honestly think that USENET is/was more important than the WWW, I think you are sadly wrong. The WWW has made Grandma and Grampa and Mom and Pop go on the Internet. I don't remember any kind of surge to the Internet in 1979 when USENET started. I bet almost anyone would agree that the WWW had much more of an impact that USENET.
    ------------
    a funny comment: 1 karma
    an insightful comment: 1 karma
    a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
  • Usenet was never about being pretty, it was all about the information. Bastardizing it like putting in HTML, inline images and such would just be travesty. Granted, it'll probably happen (if it hasn't already in some areas), but that doesn't change the fact that it would sad.

  • Re:Uh.... (Score:1)

    by ink ( 4325 )
    As the quote goes: "Usenet is IRC with everything logged"

    The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.

  • Re:Uh.... (Score:1)

    by ink ( 4325 )
    Usenet might have been a pioneering effort that showed how to build community, but it has since degenerated into shouting matches between cretins who have more spare time than what should be legal.

    Sounds like someone got their feelings hurt.

    Usenet is a very frank discussion, and it does offend the weak hearted who would rather have a nanny at the wheel. With a good usenet reader, and a quick mind, these problems go away.

    The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.

  • The problem with Usenet is that there is no moderation.

    The problem is with your Usenet client then. Mine has both killfiles and thread scoring (not to mention that newsgroups can be moderated if they choose to be). I still read usenet more than any other discussion site. Slashdot is one of the VERY, VERY few web sites that has managed to make the transition with any grace at all. Whenever I see an UltimateBulletinBoard website, I'm quick to go elsewhere; most of the people who design web discussion groups have no idea how to implement it properly. Considering the junk that must be dealt with on usenet, it's still heaven when compared to the HTTP "equivalents".

    The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.

  • Boogie Man died? Shit! Nobody told me!
  • Well, it's probably a good think no-one told me, 'cos it was my birthday party that week-end and I would have been totally bummered if I'd known.

  • Re:Sad (Score:4)

    by sinnergy ( 4787 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @09:27AM (#119778) Homepage
    Please, no HTML in Usenet. It's bad enough as it is. The beauty of Usenet is that you could use any client on any computer practically anywhere to read it. You didn't need a fancy computer with a fancy graphical newsreader... something as simple as tin in a shell account over a 2400 baud modem was good enough (although 14.4K made things better). Usenet's strength lay in the fact that it is (was?) universal. Bastardizing it with HTML (isn't this done already with most spam?), in my opinion, won't bring anything new to the table.
  • Back when I started getting on the net, Usenet was the internet, just as the Web is the internet today. When magazine articles talked about the internet, they would list various Usenet groups and describe what people talked about on various groups.

    Looking at Usenet today, I am not happy with what I see. I see petty little turf wars, where the regulars bully anyone they consider to be a newcomer. For example, in alt.usage.english, someone had a question about the passive voice. One regular basically told the person that they were an idiot for not knowing what the passive voice is, since any Junior high school textbook on grammer can tell you what the passive voice is. When the original poster, in a rather gentle manner, tried to defend himself, he was flamed by other regulars on the newsgroup. It was a professional linguist who explained that the stuff those junior high school textbooks teach kids is very innaccurace, and, in his words "based on mythology".

    For people who are interested, the thread is at http://groups.google.com/groups?safe=off&ic=1&th=a 286df8ce2d0dc9e,72 [google.com].

    The problem with Usenet is that there is no moderation. As imperfect as the moderation system is, it is an effective way to moderate the people who want to play "king of the hill" with an online community by bullying anyone who threatens their turf down to the level of the goatse links. In fact, I can argue that a large number of people trool Slashdot because of their frustration at not being able to engage in the usual Usenet bullying tactics.

    Another traditional online exchange which encourages bullying turf wars is IRC.

    I note that both Usenet and IRC are online forums largely dominated by men. It would not surprise me if one of the reasons women do not use these exchanges is because the petty turf wars turn the women off.

    - Sam

  • It's not naive to think that they should do it, it'd be naive to think that they will. Mental note - find a spammer and punch him or her in the gut to commemorate Jim Ellis.
    --
  • "Princess Diana was no more deserving of the press attention she received ..."

    I'm sure she would have been quite happy not to have received it.

  • Aren't the advertisers smart enough to only pay for the ads that are actually reponded to?
  • No doubt when she got older she learned that you feed a mouse cheese, not peanut butter. :-)
  • I dunno, depends what group you visit. There are still plenty of groups uninfested by AOLers, spam and flame wars - though they tend to be only the more hardcore technical groups, as you'd expect. My favourite group is comp.sys.ibm.ps2.hardware - apart from the occasional poster who mistakes it for something about the PlayStation 2 :-(.
  • It's hard to believe my first exposure to the internet was through a usenet news feed at the university I attened at the time.

    Back then, I hung out quite a bit on comp.sys.apple2.*. Because of the people that posted to that newsgroup I found a ton of great shareware games, and information about the apple2. I was a fan of the apple 2 at that time, as it was my first long term exposure to computers. Most of what I had learned on that system helped me later when I hopped over to PC's, IBM's VM/CMS, and Digital's VMS, and a couple of years later Solaris followed by Linux and DEC OSF/1.

    I can honestly say if it wasn't for usenet I wouldn't have found all of the neat stuff and upgrades for the apple 2 that are still a part of that system. And of course the healthy respect for RTFM'ing before asking something that was answered in the FAQ (or now HOWTO's, man pages, info pages, hard copy manuals and so on).

    Unfortunatley over the years my use of Usenet has dwindled to nothing. Mainly from the quality of responses on the newsgroups I read. I used to get a bunch of useful replies. Last time I posted I got a slew of "me too's", 1 sorta useful reply, and a couple of replies that didn't tell me anything that I already didn't know (basically restating my question, but phrasing it as an answer). I know a lot of it most likely has to do with what newsgroup I looking at. If I find some hardcore newsgroup (like a *BSD group) I'd imagine I'd find the quality of replies I used to find on Usenet years ago. Of course now I'm much more impatient, I just hop onto irc and ask my question there, or a mailing list.

    Of course the worst part is that Jim, who came up with the idea/developed it is now gone. People like Jim Ellis are true alpha geeks. We should find a good way to preserve their work, mainly years from now when some kid reads their history book, and believes that Al Gore invented the Internet, people like Jim Ellis who did the work will be marginalized. I'd hate to see that happen.

    Anyway, enough of being on my soapbox.

  • Usenet was NOT the Internet (Score:5)

    by JoeBuck ( 7947 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @09:34AM (#119786) Homepage

    Back in the 80s, Usenet was the net for those of us who couldn't get on the Internet, because we didn't have the connections into DARPA (by virtue of being a defense contractor or big research university) to get on it. The only connectivity we had was 1200 baud modems (in some cases, 300 baud). The way you got on was that you had a Unix system and a modem, and a contact with someone that was willing to give you a news feed (possibly in exchange for lightening the load by feeding a couple of other folks).

    Actually, you didn't even need Unix. I was at a small company that did a lot of digital signal processing, and it was a VMS shop, so we ran Usenet on top of Eunice (a Unix-on-top-of-VMS emulation that sort of worked, but had only symbolic links, no hard links). I was the guy who did the Eunice port for 2.11B news: my first involvement in what would now be called a major open source project.

    Back in those days, to send mail you had to have a picture of the UUCP network topology in your head: a series of paths that would get you from here to there. There were a couple of short cuts: sites that would move messages across the country (ihnp4) or internationally (seismo, which later became uunet, the first commercial provider of news feeds).

    Because of the way Usenet worked, in the days where it went over UUCP (before NNTP), it was based on personal connections and a web of trust. Things were pretty loose, but if someone ignored community norms and behaved in a way that would clearly damage the fabric of the net, they just lost their news feed and that was that. It was cheap Internet connections and NNTP that made Canter and Siegel (the first big Usenet spammers) possible. But this reliance on personal connections had its downside: some admins enjoyed being petty dictators too much. The UUCP connection between AMD and National Semi (yes, competitors fed each other news on a completely informal basis, it was a different era) was temporarily dropped because of a personal squabble between the sysadmins.

    There were many other nets then that weren't the Internet: Bitnet, berknet (at Berkeley) and the like. Figuring out how to get mail around required wizardry: mixes of bang paths (...!oliveb!epimass!jbuck), percent signs, and at-signs (user%janus@ucbvax.ARPA).

    The user interfaces on sites like Slashdot are still vastly inferior to newsreader interfaces, like trn and friends. I could quickly blast through hundreds of messages, killing threads I wasn't interested in, skimming to get to the meat. If only sites like Slashdot would pay more attention to what worked so well about Usenet.

  • Tonight, I will lift a glass to the man responsible for so much of my free pr0n.

  • They are!

    That and the actor Jack Lemmon died yesterday, and of course Walter Mattau died about a year ago. A year ago next Monday actually.

    http://www.cnn.com/2001/SHOWBIZ/Movies/06/28/lemmo n.obit/index.html [cnn.com]

    And John Yardley who helped design the first spacecraft that put an American in space, died yesterday too:

    http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/06/27/obit.yard ley.ap/index.html [cnn.com]

    2001 seems to be a bad year for the deaths of well known people.

    --
    Delphis
  • I wish that tin over 2400 bps was the minimum client for Usenet. Unfortunately, the tradition of hardwrapped text dates back to teletypes.
    --
  • My list of subscribed groups that I am active in on a daily basis is over 20. I am also active on a few mailing lists related to Solaris and security issues.

    alt.certification.cisco
    comp.dcom.*
    comp.sys.sun.*
    comp.unix.solaris.*
    news.admin.net-abuse.email <g> - gotta post the kills

    Stuff like that... Very active groups with nearly 100% signal/noise ratio.

    Guess what, the spammers picked up my unmunged e-mail address from NANAE. That is a death wish, obviously.

    Most of my spam is to my slashdot address... Some choose to harwest it from the ICQ Whitepages. I advise AOL of such violation of terms of use of Whitepages and AOL doesn't kid around.

    The traffic is VERY strong today. I can't keep up at times.

    You can't post to alt.2600 anymore like you could in 1996 though :-). That group was killed by spam.
    --
    Leonid S. Knyshov

  • Usenet was the Internet (Score:3)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @08:55AM (#119791) Homepage Journal
    Today, people consider the Web to be the Internet. But back before the web, Usenet held that distinction.

    Sure, today Usenet isn't what it used to be, but it is in many ways the model in which discussion boards like slashdot are based. So on a historical basis, it certainly is fair to call it one of the top three applications on the net.
  • Having lost my own father to the very same cancer, I sincerely hope they had the same opportunity to say good-bye as we did.

    The final downhill slide took only a matter of days, but you sure do make good use of them when the writing's on the wall!
  • But I think that spammers should stop spamming the USENET for a day in memory of such a great man.
  • a reference for those unfamiliar with the story, the jargon file entry for the tale of the kremvax: http://tuxedo.org/jargon/html/entry/kremvax.html [tuxedo.org].
  • Here, at the time of the passing of its co-creator, I see a great out-pouring of nostalgia for Usenet of old. I also see the posts of many people who were not lucky enough to have seen it at its zenith. I think the one most amazing aspect of Usenet was not merely that you could get fast answers to pressing technical questions, but that you had direct access to some real giants of that day, and see a little bit about how they think. It wasn't just that there was more signal, in some cases the signal came from the creator of whatever it was you were asking about. Even if they worked for a Big Important Company. So if you asked an interesting question in comp.sys.mac.hypercard, chances were good that somebody from Apple would respond. Alexander Stepanov used to respond to traffic about the C++ STL. World experts at your fingertips everywhere! It should have been paradise!

    And I have to say that by and large we really blew it. It wasn't just the spam, or even the massive flamefests. It was really the corrosive effects of ignorance and greed. Take Tom Christiansen (most recently tchrist@mox.perl.com). Not always a bunch of rainbows and smiles, he, but an incredibly well-informed individual whose contributions to Usenet are the stuff of legend. Apparently chased away from Usenet for good by one too many "gimme gimme" question and one too many displays of horrible netiquette. A real tragedy.

    This was around the time I discovered Slashdot, and saw what looked like a more clueful albeit imperfect mirror of the Spirit of Usenet. I was quite cheered when I found out that tchrist himself was becoming a key contributor. It might be a new geek paradise! But, of course, that didn't happen. Tom got chased away again by a bunch of cretins.

    And, getting back to the idea of an elegy for Ellis, I believe the final straw there was some jerk maligning Jon Postel when his obituary came up in this forum. Much worse than spam.

  • No, it's just that it's been quite a while since anyone made any great strides for humanity, so there's a generation gap.

  • The problem with Usenet is that there is no moderation.

    I'm pretty sure this is a troll, but just in case not, it's called a Score File.

    See Also: GroupLens.

  • the web is more important than ftp?
  • The discussion is completely off topic but I feel I have to comment anyway:

    I would very strongly disagree that http can do
    everything that ftp can do. ftp is a general purpose file transfer program that provides a lot of the functionality that you get from ls,cp,rm but between two machines. It provides authentication, separate data and control channels and heaps more stuff. http is simple and stupid and thats why it is so widely used. http is very poor at file transfer - it can't do restarts.
  • Another victim of the CancelMoose(tm).
    *sigh*

  • in related news... (Score:4)

    by krog ( 25663 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @08:54AM (#119801) Homepage
    the 200 graves adjacent to Jim Ellis are engraved with "MAKE MONEY FAST!!!" and "GET OUT OF DEBT!!!"
  • Reminds me of some discussion on /. about /. that there might be NNTP support at one point.

    Whatever happened to that?

    It would be great for taking a complete thread with you on a PDA.

  • That is truly sad (Score:4)

    by jfunk ( 33224 ) <jfunk@roadrunner.nf.net> on Friday June 29, 2001 @09:23AM (#119803) Homepage
    The Internet to me, at first, was news, ftp, and telnet. I spent an inordinate amount of time in 'nn' every day reading sci.electronics, alt.hackers (that was a very fun newsgroup about *real* hacking), and host of others.

    When I first saw the 'web' I thought, "this is crap, random words are linked to various things and it doesn't seem to make sense. Back to the newsgroups with me." I realise now that it was just my initial sampling that was total crap, but I kept up with the newsgroups anyway.

    I'm totally sad about the state of USENET over the past few years, and this just makes it all worse.

    However, for that long time I spent thriving on the USENET, I'll have to thank Jim Ellis. He indirectly helped me find out about Linux, electronics, hardware hacking, etc. Things I do professionally these days.

    I think it's a somewhat appropriate time for an:

    ObHack (I'm sorry if it's not a very good one. Good hacks, that are not your employer's intellectual property, seem to decrease to almost nothingness when you're no longer a poor student): We had this hub where a heatsink had broken off inside. I grabbed some solid wire and threaded it through the fins and through holes in the circuit board. Through a fair bit of messing around I made sure that it will *never* come out of place again. Ok, that was bad, so I'll add another simple one: Never underestimate the power of a hot glue gun. It allows you to easily provide strain relief for wires that you've soldered onto a PCB and I've also used it to make prototypes of various sensors. If you want to take it apart, and x-acto knife does the trick very easily.

    Sigh.

  • RIP (Score:2)

    by segmond ( 34052 )
    I don't even know what to say but to RIP. It is very sad when peope die young. :-( Fuck death
  • Of course, Usenet used to be an overlap with the Internet, to some limited extent it still is.

    For a long long time, most of Usenet went over UUCP, and therefore modems, not the Internet. There were therefore loads of people who had access to Usenet, but not to the Internet.

    With the ease of cheap access to the internet, almost everyone who has Usenet access also has Internet access.

  • Ahh..the good ole days! Back when to see a pr0n pic you had to save 13 messages, cat them together after removing the headers and then uudecode it.

    If there is one thing that I still hold against AOL it is letting its users gain access to Usenet news. Whoever the dude is that threw the switch on that should feel really bad. Of course he probably has plenty of AOL stock to be cashed in. ;)
  • I'd not heard of Jim Ellis until I read this post, but his creation has become a part of my daily life. For that I want to express my appreciation for Usenet - a truly amazing idea that has proven to be a continual source of information.

    RIP Jim
  • Where does Mr. Taco get off siting the 3 most important applications on the web? That's insane. Not only is he wrong, he's also blatantly wrong, making this a case that, if he were to be killed in the process of saying it, would be a prime example for a Darwin award.

    I mean, really, you can argue any 3 items are the '3 most important'... I'm not entirely sure how Usenet got up there with web and email applications. Instant messaging and IRC are obviously more 'important' to the majority of people. But are we talking about the most important, financially? Usenet would be on the bottom, web and email on the top, alongside things like remote administration and such.

    I mean, really... everyone knows that pr0n, warez, and f00derz are the 3 most important parts of the internet. :)~

    -------
    Caimlas

  • So many important dudez in heaven (Score:4)

    by chrysalis ( 50680 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @09:13AM (#119814) Homepage
    Richard Stevens. Douglas Adams (not really internet-related but definitely someone I loved). The ZIP algorithm inventor (sorry I can't remember his name) . And now Usenet's daddy. All rest in heaven now.
    But do you think Richard Stevens and the Usenet creator were enjoying today's internet ? They built something that worked perfectly to exchange tons of messages with low bandwidths. Now, everyone has 100x the bandwidth they had when they designed their product. Computers are 100x faster. So what ? Do we find info 100x faster than before ?
    Actually not. To read a simple text, you have to download hundreds of kilobytes. 99% is bloat (ads, bloated HTML, useless Java, etc) . Reading messages on a web discussion board is slow. You have to issue dozens of clicks before reading a thread, and wait for every ad to load. Usenet provided a consistent, sorted, easy to parse, and *fast* way to share info with other people.
    7 years ago, I was providing access to 12000 newsgroups on Minitel. Minitel is a french terminal, with a 1200 bauds modem (and 75 bauds in emission) . And it worked. People could easily browse all Usenet news. Faster and easier than on web sites.
    Another thing is that Usenet let you choose any client. You can choose your preferred fancy interface. Web discussion boards don't let you a lot of choice.
    Migrating from Usenet to web sites is stupid. It wastes a lot of bandwidth for nothing. People do this because :

    • Everyone can open its own web site
      • People can force users to see web ads to read messages
    • Great deal. Web discussion boards provides inconsistency and redundancy. How many web sites discusses the same thing ? How many questions are asked on a web site though they were already answered on another web site ?

    • Usenet solved this a long time ago.
      What killed Usenet is the load of uuencoded warez and spam. Everyone has to filter messages to find real ones. Lousy. But we can't fight stupidity. Give people mail access, they will send spam. Give people Napster, they will share copyrighted songs. Give people a CD writer, they will burn commercial software. Give people the web, they will DOS it or try root exploits. Give people usenet, they will kill it. And there's no way back.

    -- Pure FTP server [pureftpd.org] - Upgrade your FTP server to something simple and secure.


  • It's been a while since I saw some of those legendary people... and in the case of McElwaine, I hope it's a long time before I see his posts again.

    Does Argic still go nuts around Thanksgiving?

  • Re:MAKE GREEN CARDS FAST WITH SERDAR ARGIC AND KIB (Score:5)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @09:34AM (#119817)
    > I remember the end of the Usenet glory days (mid-90s, unfortunately just after the September That Never Ended), before it was swallowed by spam. Usenet IMHO is the place where net.culture grew up, even if it wasn't part of the Internet in the beginning.

    <AOL>Me too</AOL>

    Rest in peace, Jim. Your creation lives on.

    Kibo rot-13s, greps the 'net (there's no type, he can't set!) hey there, there goes the Kiboman... and of course Serdar's still Howling Through The Wires, Dick's ARMM'ed (ARMM'd (ARRM'd...))), and I never needed Napster, because I can still get anything I want on Alice's NNTP server [sims.net].

    UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS. Just as long as it's not alt.tasteless and rec.pets.cats at the same time.

  • Anyone who remembers FidoNet or BBS can realize just how far ahead of its time usenet was. Fidonet was a direct descendant of usenet, and it was quite a resource in its heyday.
    The model of usenet, where people can post new articles or reply to older ones is seen right here on slashdot discussions, and all the other web based discussion boards. Bulletin boards are one of the great things about the Internet. The format for discussion, seen today in mailing lists and forums like this, started with usenet.
    Fido was my first exposure to this type of information, way before I had an IP address.
    If the core of this model was not usenet, what was it? If it was, I must give credit to the people who developed usenet for their forward thinking on information exchange and hierarchy.
    It is not a perfect system, but in its flaws (namely the signal to noise ratio) is hope for better methods of communication.
  • Jim Ellis changed the world and will be sorely missed. Usenet is still going strong. In Jim's honor, I propose that we slightly modify usenet protocols so as to allow greater freedom in message formatting. It would be nice if usenet messages adopted HTML formatting. There is only so much one can do with plain text. The new usenet could then be renamed ellisnet in Jim's honor. Just a thought.
  • I am very much opposed to allowing HTML messages.

    Ok. I see many people feel strongly about retaining plain text messages and I can sympathize with their concerns. Maybe this is a question for Ask Slashdot. Or maybe it should be put to a universal vote. But then again, why not create a parallel HTML-based discussion network separate from the old one and let market and technology forces decide?
  • At the next Usenet Olympiad [netfunny.com], let there be a moment of silence in his memory before the traditional lighting of the flame thrower. All in favor, follow-up to alt.test with ME TOO!!! All opposed, spelling flame.

    Yes, I offered this with tongue in cheek. But in all honesty, we all owe him a debt of gratitude. The net would not be what it is today without his creation. I have nothing more appropriate to say than "thank you".
  • LittleStone wrote:

    > But I think that spammers should stop spamming
    > the USENET for a day in memory of such a great
    > man.

    If the spammers understood Usenet for what it is they wouldn't be spamming it. They don't know that he died. They don't know that he ever lived. The average spammer probably thinks that newsgroups were invented by either Microsoft or AOL, and that they've been around since about 1995. He probably never reads them.

    Somehow, my .sig seems particularly apt today.
  • The applications were listed in chronological order. E-mail predated Usenet (which, as I'm sure someone in this discussion must have pointed out, was not originally carried over the Internet) which predated the Web.
  • One way to truly honor Jim Ellis's memory and his contributions to the internet as we know it would be to help find a cure for the cancer that killed him.
    The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society [leukemia-lymphoma.org] (nat'l. non-profit org.) has this amazing program called Team in Training [teamintraining.org] - basically, you train for an endurance event (marathon, century cycle, triathlon, etc.), and in exchange for 3-5 months of professional coaching, staff support, transportation, accomodation, and entrance fee for your event, you agree to fundraise for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
    It's such an inspiring experience. It's totally doable - you can go from complete slothdom to finishing a marathon in just a few months. And you get to meet patients with various blood-related cancers, and hear about their experiences - after you find out what chemo & marrow transplants are like, suddenly your upcoming 14-mile run doesn't seem so hard - and you directly affect their chances of survival with every dollar you raise. It is such a good feeling, both physically and mentally, to be a part of this program.

  • Phil Katz was the creator of pkzip. It's odd, when I was a kid first getting into computers I learned about usenet and pkzip and all of the other things you learn by osmosis when you throw yourself into the hobby of computers and programming. And now I see all these names, that I first learned back then, in the news pretty frequently because they have passed away. It's pretty unfortunate that some of these people are dying so young.

  • USENET did have a solution, it had moderated newsgroups! Though, by and large, such were not necessary. The signal to noise ratio was relatively high. Kill files are good when idiots are rare, but not so effective when they predominate.

    The world has changed in a couple of decades. We have gone from removing occassional trash to gleaning trash for useful material. It is a sad transformation.

  • web vs usenet (Score:3)

    by wunderhorn1 ( 114559 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @08:57AM (#119841)
    I have a vision of a large group of Vikings, all chanting,
    "Spam spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!"

    Have you got anything without spam?

  • I think that Usenet is the one thing that can survive all the upheavals, because you can create its infrastructure out of nothing.

    When the Web is spammed and commercialized until its content approaches zero, when better-than-a-modem bandwidth is either unaffordable or choked with advertising, any group of three people with modems can start a new Usenet, with a lot less cost and effort than it would take to build a new Internet.
  • Most CS schools (at least mine) has their own newsgroups.. many the the groups are oriented for each specific class, but if you go outside those, you can often find cool niche communities using usenet at your school. Our school has an opensource club, and a very active opensource newsgroup.. a good tech politics newsgroup.. general discussion.. etc. Using these groups, you see familiar names, familiar personalities.. it really gives you a taste of what usenet was like in the pre-web / pre-spam days.

    -gerbik

  • Re:RIP (Score:3)

    by pallex ( 126468 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @09:15AM (#119846)
    Me too!

  • I still use USENET more than any other forum for general purpose Q and A type stuff. If there was no USENET and I had a problem I couldn't solve there is nothing comparable on the web. Sure there are websites, but many require logins. With USENET I can search the list of groups for a forum that relates to a *very* specific topic, such as comp.graphics.algorithms. If these were all done by specialty websites, I'd have to have a login for each one! Yuck! Can you imagine maintaining a list of 30,000 links and userids for each user? I don't even want to think about it.

    As to Mr. Ellis, it's sad that he died at such a young age. I didn't know him, but his idea has helped me and will continue to help me for many years. Maybe someday there will be an Internet hall of fame. He should certainly be there.

  • You obviously haven't read the Pink Squishy Computer FAQ. Here is the relevant excerpt:

    17.1 Q: Why isn't my PSC Pink?

    17.1 A: The "pink" part only refers to the interior components. Cases come in a wide variety of colors. The easiest way to verify this is to observe the Speech Synthesis Unit, which contains an opening that leads to the interior.

    17.2 Q: Is a PSC of one color compatible with PSCs of other colors?

    17.2 A: Under normal circumstances, and with the proper software all units have a baseline social compatability. For a deeper understanding of problems that arise, see chapter 22 of the PSC Programmers Guide, Race Conditions And How To Prevent Them.

  • Before You Post (Score:5)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @09:23AM (#119849) Journal

    Before You Post. You need to be made aware that your message will be forwarded and duplicated on computers all over the world, even the pink squishy ones. It has been estimated that one troll costs millions of dollars. In the case of silicon computer systems, this results in increased costs to maintain and install new hardware. In the case of pink squishy systems, it results in a decreased regard for humanity in general, and contributes to the viewpoint that there are just too many sick people out there. The dollar cost of cynicism hasn't been estimated, but there is strong evidence that it impairs the function of the pink squishy computer in ways that aren't fully understood. Are you really sure you want to post that troll? Hit x to cancel, p to post.

  • Actually... (Score:5)

    by CptnHarlock ( 136449 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @09:34AM (#119852) Homepage
    There are many usenet groups that still function as they once did (mid 90's). Some even have more traffic and less SPAM than when the real SPAM WARS were on. It's mostly pr0n groups and unfortunate groups with pr0n alike names (like alt.lesbians) that attract SPAMers. For me the Usenet is as usefull as whe I first started using it.

    The nasty thing IMHO is all the email collecting bots that wander trough ALL groups pr0n or no pr0n. A newbie has no chance to know about this and fake an email or SPAM-prove it. Many an email accounts are rendered useless by this.

    Cheers..
    --
    $HOME is where the .*shrc is


  • So in the future, you will have to go to google's cached [google.com] copy of Jim Ellis. Remember not to run any binary attachments Jim may have without screening with a virus scanner.
  • Yeah -- didn't the old kremvax joke become a reality because it was vectored through Usenet?

    /Brian
  • I remember the end of the Usenet glory days (mid-90s, unfortunately just after the September That Never Ended), before it was swallowed by spam. Usenet IMHO is the place where net.culture grew up, even if it wasn't part of the Internet in the beginning. No offense to the /. community, but to those of you who never experienced it, Usenet back in the day was a place the likes of which we probably won't see again.

    Places like /. and k5 still have an echo of the old Usenet, and you likewise still get some of it on mailing lists now, but take a look through Google Groups now -- too much garbage, and the community that's there is somewhat isolated because Usenet isn't as integral to the net experience as it once was.

    Two taps and a v-sign for the man -- not everyone can claim to have created a true community single-handedly.

    /brian

  • So many good people are dying (Score:3)

    by dbolger ( 161340 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @08:57AM (#119862) Homepage
    Am I the only one who's noticed that there's a hell of a lot of people dying lately who have made great contributions to humanity (well, specifically, who've made my own life a lot better) - Douglas Adams, John Lee Hooker, and now Jim Ellis. Damn, the world is becomming a worse place :( RIP.
  • "Overratted"? Now that really bothers me. I take it for granted that I'll be modded down from time to time. But this is a blatent case of "I disagree so I'll mod him down." Uncool. You're destroying Slashdot when you pull shit like that.

    If you must use your mod points to promote an agenda, it's more productive to mod up people you agree with. Or at least find a legitimate reason to mod down people you disagree with.

    Yeah, this is offtopic. You'd be within your rights in modding me down. But don't do it just to "teach him a lesson". No point. I got so much karma its ridiculous.

    __

  • Re:Actually... (Score:3)

    by isomeme ( 177414 ) <cdberry@gmail.com> on Friday June 29, 2001 @10:24AM (#119867) Journal
    The nasty thing IMHO is all the email collecting bots that wander trough ALL groups pr0n or no pr0n. A newbie has no chance to know about this and fake an email or SPAM-prove it. Many an email accounts are rendered useless by this.

    I use my real email address in Usenet postings, and I post quite frequently to several groups (comp.lang.perl.misc and sci.space.science being at the top of the list). I feel that it is polite to offer a real, unmunged address to those who might wish to contact you privately. Part of this attitude probably comes from my having started using Usenet way back when in the early 80s, when the online world was indeed a different place.

    So, my email address does in fact get harvested by a lot of Usenet crawlers, and I get a lot of spam sent to me as a result. But I never see 95% of it. The trick is to use a good mail filter, and to spend perhaps 15 minutes a week tweaking its patterns. This can be a fun activity for...well, for anyone likely to be reading /., actually. :-)

    Don't let the abusers chase you into hiding. Use the power that technology gives you. Take control.

    --

  • http is very poor at file transfer - it can't do restarts.

    Check out RFC2616 and look for "partial GET". HTTP 1.1 could do a restart by requesting the range after the last byte it received. The browsers just aren't implementing it.

  • So long, and thanks for all the pr0n

  • Does anybody else thinks that Taco posts flamebait just to get more people to read the comments and then hit the reply button, all for more advertising?

    I'd like to see the order of those three internet technologies when they're put into a poll on /. My guess is that it would be Web, FTP, E-Mail, Gnutella, and somewhere after VRML would be Usenet.

  • Re:Actually... (Score:3)

    by b1t r0t ( 216468 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @01:01PM (#119878)
    You can have it both ways by posting a mutating but valid address that will expire in a month or so but is still obviously munged such that a human putting it in an address book can figure out your real address. The main ways of doing this are the Sendmail '+' hack (user+arbitrarystring@example.com), and temporary third-level DNS entries (user@7a235f6e.example.com).
  • USENET isn't what it once was, once the domain of mostly IT workers, hackers, researchers. Now it's overrun with people from AOL, many of whom wouldn't have had the slightest clue how to thread news in rn or trn. It's still the first place I turn for help on anything and beyond the trolls and off-topic posters, wandering run-on replies of vacant-headed flames, it's still the best. Ask Slashdot only handles about 1 question a day and I ain't that patient. ;-)

    --
    All your .sig are belong to us!

  • Back in 1980 I upgraded a message system at a small midwestern community college (still have the source =-) and thought we had something pretty cool then. It had threads, flamewars, trolls, you name it and it rocked.

    Between then and 1986 I used a couple local BBS's, one FidoNet node and countless hours on GEnie, which was an OK replacement, although the price was high, it still beat CompuServe's clumsy implimentation.

    From 1986 to 1988 I had my own medical problems and the baggage of depression which accompanies a brush with lingering death. It was about this time a friend pointed me to a dialup network in Cleveland, Ohio, where I could sift through hundreds of topics, pose questions to like-minded geeks, and follow development on projects I had an interest in. It was better than everything else combined and I was hooked. I still am. But it's like the double edged sword. You want your friends to know about something so cool and be able to keep touch through it, yet you know as ripples in a pond, their friends and their friends friends will find it and some will have influences good and bad. It's still the most democratic thing about the internet, and I worry from time to time about what Google's motives are.

    Where will USENET be tomorrow? Will some corporate giant attempt to take it over, establish new standards for how it works, put a price tag on access? Hopefully someone's still out there looking after it.

    --
    All your .sig are belong to us!

  • Every now and then I go through a change in how I'm able to access it (just lost Deja and all my subs, as awful as they were) going from unix shells with wonderful, fast news readers to pathetic ad-bloated web interfaces, back to somewhere in between.

    Sure, there will always be crossposters or some jerk trying to sell something by spamming all groups, even the out of place newbie (rec.collecting.coins: Hi, what's this stamp worth [huge img]) I do get the feeling that it's getting a little better, as the less dedicated wander off to some web forum and leave USENETters alone.

    BTW, whomever told me to burn in hell for my contributions to alt.humor.puns, thanks, I wasn't sure I was getting the hang of it.

    --
    All your .sig are belong to us!

  • Our loss is great, but not so much as if they never were.

    --
    All your .sig are belong to us!

  • Perhaps like many slashdotters, my initial exposure was through USENET newsgroups, where I'd obtain help with my Amiga computer, C64, nethack [nethack.org], Ren and Stimpy and a host of other things. Life would have been less full, without their tremendous contribution. My heart and thanks go out to him, his family and friends.

    --
    All your .sig are belong to us!

  • If it weren't for people like this, us working class intelligensia wouldn't be able to share information and track the IMPORTANT issues going in our respective governments. We can only hope that more people come along who are willing to share their research with the rest of us....

    Thank your respective Deity or non-deity for people like this...

  • Re:Uh.... (Score:4)

    by Auckerman ( 223266 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @09:04AM (#119886)
    Usenet is more important than the web?

    Depends on what you consider important, but in some ways, Yes. UseNet was one of the first non-centralized way of distributing information. It is also quite possibilty the greatest resource for the personal sharing of knowledge in near real time with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people all over the world. Why you ask? Despite what you might see over at alt.binaries.pictures.* and alt.barney.die.die.die the singal to noise ratio is infinitely better than doing a search on google and you can generally get multiple informed replys to questions on almost any subject....

  • Places like /. and k5 still have an echo of the old Usenet
    I can't detect any such echo. Your hearing must be very good.

    Agreed. Slashdot is much more like the BBSs that many people should remember from their high school days.

    For us, it wasn't September that brought on the yearly flood of newbies... it was Christmas, with lots of kids getting new computers as presents from their parents, and somehow finding their way onto the BBS scene.

    My first experience of USENET was that it was much more mature than the BBS culture. People on USENET did not engage in fp-like antics, like we did on the BBSs. The professional programmers and sysadmins who frequented USENET did not concern themselves about being 31337 hacker doodz like on the BBS scene. Most shocking to me at the time, people mostly posted to USENET using their real names.

  • Re:So many good people are dying (Score:3)

    by kcwhitta ( 232438 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @09:25AM (#119891)
    Yeah, I've noticed that since about 4 years ago, when both Princess Diana and Mother Teresa died. I think as you get older, you end up recognizing more people and gradually as time goes on, they'll all have to eventually leave this life. It's not that the number of people dying has increased; it's that more people have affected you and your perception has increased.

    Keenan
  • Taco didn't mean second in importance; he meant second in time.

  • Founder of Usenet dead?

    But that's where I get all my porn!

    The world is not fair!

  • I would argue that Usenet is #1 on that list. It is the birthplace of the free electronic exchange of ideas, similar to what we have here in Slashdot, or IRC before that. (And all those damn chat rooms)

    Email certainly gives it a run for its money, but it didn't help turn the net into a community like Usenet did. When one looks toward the future of the net the web will be gaining in prominence I'm sure, but everything seems to be headed toward a community type structure.

  • Rest in Peace (Score:3)

    by r_j_prahad ( 309298 ) <r_j_prahad AT hotmail DOT com> on Friday June 29, 2001 @10:51AM (#119903)
    It would be fitting if his final resting place were to be topped with an eternal flame. Jim would've appreciated the humor in that.

    My condolences to all his loved ones.

  • I'd go so far as to say that intense media focus on certain people exaggerates just what they mean to us, and just how we perceive the celebrity death-march, but I'd just get modded down as flamebait and no one would hear a different opinion :(

  • Besides the obvious need to have respect for the dead, I feel that Jim Ellis deserves respect because he made the first internet resource that strived to create a community atmosphere. This is the model that the web boards found on many websites were based on, and certainly was an influence on the Slashdot model. Whoever made the sarcastic comment about the graves saying "make money now", I understand you were trying to be funny, but I have a hard time laughing about people who have recently died. It's hardly Jim's fault Usenet has become such a wasteland.

  • Old UseNet founders don't die... (Score:4)

    by Violet Null ( 452694 ) on Friday June 29, 2001 @09:09AM (#119916)
    They get archived by DejaNews.

    And then _it_ dies.
  • "Usenet of course began in 1979, and is the 2nd of the 3 most important applications on the net (the first being email, and the third being the web)."

    I consider myself somewhat "old school" (I was first introduced to the internet through email and newsgroups on CompuServe -- on a 300 baud modem when I was 5), but even I would argue that the web has had more significance than Usenet. True, Usenet fostered a lot of ideas (and, ahem, child pornography), but the web has touched a vast greater majority of people, and while nacient set off an economic boom (and drop) Usenet never saw. Plus, the web is a heck of a lot user-friendlier (something that means a lot in today's computing world -- even to myself).

    I imagine this is just another effort by Rob to "stir the Slashdot pot". God it gets irritating after awhile.

  • RIP (Score:2)

    by pcwood ( 463560 )
    alt.rest.in.peace
  • It is so sad to hear about an old friend passing away by reading it on the web. I went to work at MCNC in '86 doing all the computer support, and I remember both Jim and Carolyn. One of my most memorable stories is from him. They had a little girl (VERY little) and let her play with the computer. Of course, that wasn't supposed to happen, but one day he brought me a mouse that didn't work. When I opened it up, it was full of peanut butter! Your techie always knows all your secrets!

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